Yes but it doesn't have to share usernames to anything but the originating server for the vote and host server for the content. All others only need the sum.

This does still mean instance admins can do broad bans. There's other privacy techniques if that matters like cryptographic blind signatures for voting, etc, where you can know each user only cast one vote (and can see totals per originating server) without revealing the specific users.

In theory you could also make this ban compliant (such that you can't vote if you're banned, but if you're not and cast a vote you still can't be identified).

If you do extra fancy stuff like transparency logs with anonymous credentials and secure multiparty computation (MPC) you could do it while still allowing abuse detection. Although for now that's very complicated and compute heavy 🤷

Theoretically, couldn't instances have been designed to count the sums of upvotes and downvotes by their users for any given post or comment—those counts being federated with each increase or decrease—so that a tool such as lemvotes would only be able to output a list of instances for voting activity, rather than their individual users?

Doing so would remove the ability for moderators to see individual voting patterns unless that data were also sent separately in an encrypted manner that could only be accessed by moderator accounts, however.

Agreed.

Exactly. Anyone in the fediverse can arbitrarily become an admin, simply by deciding to host an instance.

If you want your votes to be (somewhat) private, probably the best thing to do is to create an alternative account and use that for voting without making any comments/posts.

PieFed also gives you an option so that your votes are only shared within the same instance. So, tools like "lemvotes" wouldn't be able to pick up on your voting history. In that case only the local instance Admins (and maybe moderators) would be able to see your voting history.

From this user it is fairly obvious that it was created recently. They downvoted 49 times in the first few minutes of activity. They then upvoted once a few days later.

https://lemvotes.org/user/PyroRondo@lemmy.world

Based on the first day of activity, it almost does look like this was an account created just for downvoting.

Nothing is private on the Fediverse.

Kbin used to publicly show them. It’s a design choice of the software not too.

I remember this being an issue when I first joined, to an instance admin is a simple as performing an SQL query .

Unfortunately Lemmy is full of people who can't stand criticism and actually prefer having it this way, instead of finding a compromise.

Mods can see votes on content in their communities without needing external tools too. The information is public, it's just not usually made visible to everyone.

Community moderators can also see who has upvoted or downvoted on their own communities.

sometimes the truth is harsh

harassment is a weird word to use when neither of us has pinged them and it's entirely likely they will never see these messages.